Does anyone smart enough to install a browser plugin (much less visit GitHub) really need something to identify fake news sites?
Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
31–40 of 117 posts
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#32I was working on something similar, but with a database that would contain credibility ratings from users and users would rate the website. The extension was supposed to display the rating and ev. warnings on top of the website. Nice project. I may use it :)
So in other words, Web of Trust for news sites.
Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on their WOT page.
You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#33[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#34Fake news = news we don't like. This is just another way to make secluded echo chambers. I see some people learned nothing from the election.
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
> No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories
That's great, but that's not what this project appears to be focused on. It currently has a hardcoded blocklist, some of which is clearly just right-wing news/opinion with little to no ads - clearly not what you've described as spam sites.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#35Define bullshit.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#36There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.
Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers. Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users. EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when t…
Tools for analyzing information can work, but they need to help the person using them make their own judgements, rather than delegate the whole process to some third party or opaque model/algorithm.
This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.
Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
> No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories That's great, but that's not what this project appears to be focused on. It currently has a hardcoded blocklist, some of which is clearly just right-wing news/opinion with little to no ads - clearly not what you've described as spam sites.
Which one from the list are you thinking of? The last one someone (a clearly reasonable commenter) picked out turned out to be a perfect example of the kinds of sites I'm talking about.
Incidentally: I have nothing to say about the utility of this particular project. I just know that there really is fakenews, and it's not subjective.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#38Fake news = news we don't like. This is just another way to make secluded echo chambers. I see some people learned nothing from the election.
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
Exactly. Those are the only websites I'm interested in targeting with this extension.
For example, I would never blacklist Breitbart, because I'm not interested in censoring political opinions I disagree with. I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#39Does anyone smart enough to install a browser plugin (much less visit GitHub) really need something to identify fake news sites?
You never know. Also, the smart enough person can install it on browsers on less smart people.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like it's currently using a hard coded list of urls that are considered to be bad. For general requests: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s... For facebook: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...
Yeah, it's just some arbitrary list of a few hardcoded URLs right now... Is this really useful??
Consider that I built it this night for http://lauzhack.com/, so it's not intended to be a fully-featured solution to the problem.
The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.